


you said that I changed with my cold heart

by plutosrose



Category: Hemlock Grove
Genre: Alternate Scene, Angst, F/M, M/M, References to Canonical Character Death, Violent Sex in Chapter 2, no happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-23
Updated: 2020-06-25
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:34:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24880045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plutosrose/pseuds/plutosrose
Summary: Peter leaves, Peter returns.Roman breaks and isn't put back together again.
Relationships: Past Peter Rumancek/Letha Godfrey, Roman Godfrey/Peter Rumancek
Comments: 2
Kudos: 39





	1. Departure

**Author's Note:**

> title is from the song Don't Call Me Up by Mabel

It had only been about a day since Letha had died, but being alive made him feel heavy.

It didn’t make any sense to Roman that someone like Letha - someone who was kind and sweet and laughed like he imagined a fucking angel did - would die. Or could die. It occurred to him at that moment that up until that very moment, he had been living in a world where she never would die.

At least, not for a really long time, and not before him.

Instinct had carried him to the trailer where the Rumanceks lived. He had practically spent more time there than he had in his own home since they came to town, excluding the time that he’d been in a coma.

When he got there, however, he wasn’t prepared for the sight that greeted him.

Lynda was loading boxes into their car. When she made eye contact with him, she gave him a curt nod. “Peter’s inside,” she said softly. When he looked through the windows, he could see shadows of even more boxes.

His stomach dropped, and he nodded back as he descended the steps to the trailer.

Peter was inside, folding shirts (some of which Roman had bought for him after he’d told him that he’d gotten sick of seeing him wear clothes with holes in them), and placing them into boxes.

Roman gulped when he realized that Peter was surrounded by even more boxes.

“You’re leaving.”

He can’t stop the hint of betrayal from rising up inside of him. Letha’s death had torn him open, and here Peter was, willing to continue slicing him open further, by leaving and going who the hell knew where.

Peter let out a shaky sigh. “Yeah,” he said, eyes not meeting Roman’s. Roman was suddenly filled with the impulse to scream at him for daring not to look at him when he was talking to him.

“Don’t,” he demanded, and Peter sighed again, because there was no don’t about it. He and his mother had never lived anywhere for very long, and now that Letha was gone, Hemlock Grove felt hollow. Frankly, after Christina’s death, Shelley’s disappearance, and Letha dying in childbirth, he never wanted to see or hear about the stupid town ever again.

He put down the shirt that he’d been folding and went to the fridge, nothing there was still a six-pack inside. He nodded to Roman, who still looked as though he was on the verge of screaming or crying, he wasn’t sure which. He frowned to himself - he had spent so much time with Roman over the past few months that he could easily discern one stormy mood from another. The fact that he couldn’t easily tell in that moment was worrying.

“Come on,” Peter said, motioning to the backdoor. “Let’s go out for a bit.”

Peter was half-expecting Roman to refuse, but to his surprise, Roman shuffled after him.

Peter didn’t stop walking until they were through the thicket of trees that surrounded the Rumancek’s trailer, didn’t stop walking until Godfrey Manor was within view, just over the top of the grassy hill that stretched out before them.

Peter set down the six-pack in the grass by a series of rambling, broken fences that Roman remembered his mother telling him had once been part of a homestead that had been on the property in the early 1900s. Or was it late 1800s? Honestly, he was never completely listening when she was talking.

Peter opened one bottle for himself and one for Roman. Roman downed about half of the liquid in one gulp, burning his throat on the way down. “Why are you leaving?” he asked.

Peter shrugged. “It was time.”

Roman downed the rest of the beer, before throwing the bottle as hard as he could at one of the fence posts. It shattered into a hundred pieces on impact, and as satisfying as that was, it didn’t do much for him as far as Peter was concerned.

“Bullshit,” he hissed. He grabbed for another beer, because having something in his hands unrelated to Peter was the only thing anchoring him in that moment. “You’re running away.”

“We’re not running away, we were always--”

“I was talking about you, Peter, not your fucking mother,” Roman shot back. “You are running away. And I don’t believe that you were always going to leave.” Peter had seemed so dedicated to killing the vargulf and saving their town that it seemed completely out of the question that he would ever leave. Why save something that you were just going to abandon anyway?

Peter winced, turning away from Roman for a moment as he took a sip of his own beer. “I don’t want to be here. Not without Letha.”

From the look on Roman’s face, this was exactly the thing that he’d been waiting to hear, and exactly the thing that he didn’t want to hear, all rolled up into one. Roman was red-faced and seething, and took his bottle and threw it again, glass raining down as it shattered.

“Letha is dead!” Roman nearly screeched, because the weight of those words were pressing against his chest. “She is fucking dead, Rumancek, and she’s never coming back!”

Anger flared behind Peter’s eyes. “I know what being dead is, Roman!”

“Yeah, you sure?” Roman asked, stalking closer to him. Peter instinctively took a step back. “Because last time I checked, Rumancek, I wasn’t fucking dead, and here you are, ready to fucking leave me.”

Roman felt better and worse saying that out loud. He turned away from Peter and shook his head. Peter stepped closer, and put a hand on his shoulder. “Roman--”

“--don’t fucking ‘Roman’ me,” he snapped, waving Peter’s arm off. “You waiting for me to beg you to stay? Because I’m not going to. And you know why? Because I know you too well. You’d just be lying to get me to feel better, and then you will leave tonight or tomorrow morning or whenever the fuck. And you won’t look back. So why should I?”

Peter looked at him expectantly, and was about to point out that by coming to the trailer and tried to find him, Roman had looked back. But he didn’t get his chance.

Instead, Roman swiveled around, grabbed the front of Peter’s shirt, and hauled him close, pressing his lips against his own.

After the initial shock had worn off, Peter relaxed into the kiss, and threaded his fingers through Roman’s hair, a shiver going through him when he realized that Roman took pride in the state of his hair and he was messing it up.

“Don’t go,” Roman said softly, pressing their foreheads together. And hell if he didn’t want to promise that he wouldn’t, in that moment.

But the gaping loss that had been left inside him when Letha died, the fear and the uncertainty that he held every moment that he was in Hemlock Grove, they weren’t going to go away if he stayed in town and he wallowed in it. He shook his head and stepped away.

He picked up the remaining bottles and started heading back in the direction of the trailer. He expected Roman to shout after him, but he didn’t. He just watched him leave.

Somehow that made him feel worse.


	2. Return

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You left me. When I fucking needed you, you left me. Why the fuck would I give you a single penny now?” he asked, narrowing his eyes dangerously as Peter tried to pry him off.

When Peter leaves, he is torn open again, the wounds from Letha’s death smarting all over again. He wants to crawl into a hole and die, only it turns out that he’s not allowed or even able to die.

The realization that Letha had never met an angel hits him harder than he’d expected. Of course, he didn’t think that Letha had actually met an angel. Instead, he had always thought that maybe she was hiding a boyfriend like she’d tried to hide Peter at first.

He just could never have expected this.

He vaguely remembered going to see one of those dumb vampire movies with a cheerleader at school. He remembered her bubblegum-pink lip gloss, and her long, heavy blonde hair that she swept up into a ponytail. Although he couldn’t remember which movie it was, he definitely didn’t remember it saying something about the fact that vampires - upir - didn’t just feel cold. They felt each pinprick of ice under their veins.

His mom was right, and as much as he hated that miserable cunt and wanted her to stay six feet under - where she frankly belonged - Peter had skipped over stealing the rings on his fingers and had stolen the love in his heart.

He was pretty sure in that movie that the vampire’s cold heart had melted, because some girl had stubbornly refused to give up on him.

But what if she had given up?

Because there was nothing left to save, or really, even find. If he had a heart, it had stopped beating the moment that he’d sliced his wrists.

~

He had spent a pretty penny on a private investigator, who within weeks had told him that Peter was somewhere outside of a tiny town on the Ohio-Pennsylvania border. Roman had screamed and broken a vase when he’d found out, because Ohio was only about an hour away. Hour and a half, if you hit traffic.

Peter had left him and he didn’t even have the decency to go very far.

~

He spent the rest of the summer in Hawaii, because there was no way that you could squint anywhere in Hawaii and mistake it for Hemlock Grove or fucking Pennsylvania. There was no way that he could mistake the girls that kept him company for Peter, either.

~  
He knew that Peter was coming before he knew himself.

The private investigator had let him know that there was a warrant out for Lynda Rumancek’s arrest. Roman didn’t know a lot about the law, but he figured that the man had come by that information through less-than-legal means (let alone the fact that he probably wouldn’t have been able to tell him if he had come by it through legal means).

Peter’s family was desperately poor, and if there was one person that Peter loved the most in this world, it was his mother.

“What are we talking about here?” he’d asked the man, passing him another stack of bills before he continued.

“Twenty years, probably. At least. She has a sheet a mile long. It’s a lot of little things, really, but enough little things, and they all start to add up after a while.”

~

He should have been excited by the prospect of Peter coming back to Hemlock Grove. But, it only took him a few seconds to remember that things weren’t the same. Shelley had been formally accused of Christina Wendall’s murder, and if she ever came back--

“She’s dead,” he reminded himself, because her being dead was better than her having to live the rest of her life by herself in some godforsaken prison somewhere.

His mother was gone - he didn’t think she was dead, but she was gone, and that was close enough for now.

Letha was gone too, but that was the only thing that had seemed to matter to Peter, he thought bitterly.

Letha with her perfect smile and her perfect blue eyes and her perfect baby bump looking like the fucking Virgin Mary.

He didn’t want to think about Letha anymore. But it was hard when every time he thought of Peter, he thought of Letha.

He found himself wondering - as the date of Peter’s return came closer and closer - if they would have actually stayed together. If they would have gotten married.

If they would have had kids of their own.

The thought makes him green, and not just because he drank half a bottle of scotch that night.

He’d always had a high tolerance, but now, he can barely feel the difference between being drunk and being sober.

~

“I need twenty-thousand dollars,” is the first thing that Peter says to him when he’s standing at the threshold of his new house.

He wants to laugh in his face, or at least keep the carefully managed distance between them.

But he’d always been drawn to Peter, as though he was some kind of inescapable natural force.

He descended the stairs, chin tilted as he finally got a good look at him.

And the more that he looked at him, the more he wanted to scream.

Peter looked the same as he had that night in the backfield when they’d kissed. There was no hint behind his eyes of anything other than sadness and fear over what might happen to his mother.

No hint of regret.

And then, he snapped.

He closed the distance between them and curled his fingers in Peter’s jacket. “Roman, what the fuck--” he started, before Roman slammed him into the wall.

Peter might have been strong when the wolf was with him, but he was strong all the time now.

“You left me. When I fucking needed you, you left me. Why the fuck would I give you a single penny now?” he asked, narrowing his eyes dangerously as Peter tried to pry him off.

“This isn’t about me Roman, this is about my mom, and you’re the only one--”

“--oh, I’m the only one?” Roman asked. Maybe he would have felt hurt if emotions hadn’t felt numb since the night that he’d died in his mother’s arms. “Really? Wonder what the fuck that feels like.”

“Please,” Peter breathes, and it’s hard for Roman to tamp down the impulse to squeeze the life out of him right then and there. “Just put me down, and we can discuss this--”

“No. Get out of my house.”

He does put Peter down, but he doesn’t give him any room to turn around and walk out. Instead, his hand balls up, nails digging into his palm, and he swings, as hard as he can.

Peter’s head whips back, and for a split second, Roman can almost see shock and hurt in his eyes as blood trickles from his nose.

And then, Peter lunges for him.

Privately, ever since he’d seen Peter shift, he had wondered if Peter was any different when he wasn’t the wolf. If Peter could hear or see further than a normal human could, or if he had better reflexes. Maybe they would have tested it if they were still friends, and if Peter hadn’t left him to his own thoughts over the past few months.

It was a mistake, he quickly decides to think that Peter isn’t strong, because he comes very close to being able to pin him down, hands squeezing at his throat.

Roman managed to knee him in the stomach, sending him tumbling off to the side, and when Peter comes for him again, knocking him into the glass table in the living room, the glass threatens to shatter under their weight.

“You are so fucking selfish!” Peter manages, just before another hit connects with his nose. He doesn’t have to touch it to know that it’s definitely broken. “This isn’t about us or our bullshit, this is about my fucking mother spending the rest of her life in prison because you’re too much of a douchebag to get your head out of your ass!”

Roman grabs him by the shirt collar again and slams him down on the floor, pinning him under his weight.

“Why should I help your mother?”

“She was always kind to you.”

“Yeah, and a fucking junkie would have been a better mom than Olivia was,” Roman snapped, leaning in closer, careful to keep his legs where they were, trapping Peter against him. “You’re not really proving anything.”

“Because of what it would mean to me.”

Those words catch him off guard, though that was probably the intention, Roman would rationalize later. Peter didn’t mean it. It wouldn’t mean anything to him beyond helping him get his mother back. He would leave him again, and if he had any love left, he would take that with him.

“Fuck you,” Roman hissed, “Fuck you and what it would mean to you.”

Without thinking about it further, he spits on him. He moves up slightly, intending to repeat the earlier demand that Peter get out of his house, when Peter curls his hand around the back of his neck and crushes their lips together.

It was better and worse than every fantasy that he’d had since Peter had left him, because the Peters in his dreams never left him. And this one would, if given the chance.

He bit Peter’s lip hard enough to draw blood, thinking it would make Peter decide to go. Except, he doesn’t. Suddenly, he’s deepening the kiss, and Roman, who has not had one of those stupid leeches in days, is licking the trail of blood into his mouth.

It’s hasty, and it’s nothing he wanted and everything at the same time. He isn’t sure why Peter’s in a hurry, but he is, hastily tearing his belt away, and taking his cock into his mouth.

He swore loudly - there were stars tearing through his vision, and every muscle in his body felt like it was actually alive, for the first time in months.

Peter is not inside him for long, before Roman urges him to change positions. He’s never done this before, but he has an inkling of what he wants in that moment.

And what he wants is to make him bleed more.

Just hitting him wasn’t enough.

He digs his teeth into Peter’s back, drawing blood. Peter’s moaning underneath him, but it’s not enough. None of it’s enough.

He hits him hard on his back, trying to dig his nails in as much as possible.

Peter screams.

In the back of his mind, he thinks that this might have been fun in another life, one where he doesn’t want to make Peter hurt and bleed as much as he wants to crawl inside of him.

When it’s done, they kiss for a few seconds, allowing Roman to indulge in that fantasy for a few more seconds.

Until Roman reaches out to put pressure on Peter’s nose, making him scream out in pain. “What the fuck--”

“Leave,” Roman said sharply, standing up and adjusting his clothes. “If you come back here, I’ll kill you.”

The threat makes a flash of horror apparent across Peter’s features for a moment as he cradles his nose. “Fine Roman, if that’s what you want.”

It’s not.


End file.
